A Review of the Various Security Risks Involved with Emerging Augmented Reality Technologies

Abstract

In recent years, augmented reality (AR) has become a significant computing paradigm. By constantly gathering sensory input from the user's surroundings and overlaying visual feedback on top of the user's experience of the physical world, these technologies allow users to connect with digital content in new and exciting ways. AR has the ability to radically change how we interact with technology in our everyday lives, with application domains ranging from entertainment and education to automotive assistance and several others. The specific capabilities that make AR technologies so effective can also expose users to new security and privacy threats, and we currently lack a deep understanding of these risks or how to protect against them.

Our research uncovered a wide variety of viewpoints and concerns, as well as potential technical defences. Finally, this paper looks into the difficulty of allowing multiple AR applications to enrich a user's environment at the same time, describes ways in which AR apps can communicate with one another when attempting to view content, and suggests multiple design directions for AR platforms to better support multi-application systems. We discover an emerging multi-application environment ideal for further discovery by reviewing today's state-of-the-art market AR headsets. These research elements, taken collectively, provide a structure for better identifying the security and privacy risks associated with emerging AR technologies, as well as developing such technologies to better protect consumers from damage.